Cataloguing creates the structured, standardised descriptions that let users find, identify, select and obtain resources. It is the intellectual heart of the library: consistent metadata is what turns a pile of items into a searchable collection and lets one library's records interoperate with the wider bibliographic universe. Modern cataloguing is governed by content standards, encoding standards and conceptual models working together.

The dominant content standard is RDA (Resource Description and Access), which implements the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) - a conceptual model uniting the earlier FRBR entities of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. RDA replaced AACR2 and is designed for a linked-data future.

Standards you must know

  • RDA / IFLA-LRM - the content rules and conceptual model for describing resources and their relationships.
  • MARC 21 - the long-established encoding format for exchanging bibliographic and authority data.
  • BIBFRAME - the Library of Congress linked-data model intended as MARC's successor, expressing data as RDF.
  • Dublin Core - a lightweight, general-purpose metadata element set widely used in repositories and digital collections.
  • METS, MODS and PREMIS - for structural, descriptive and preservation metadata in digital library contexts.

Authority control and identifiers

Authority control ensures that each person, organisation, place or subject is represented by a single, consistent access point, with cross-references from variants. This is what makes a catalogue reliable at scale. It increasingly relies on persistent identifiers - VIAF, ISNI, ORCID for people, and LCSH, LCNAF or a controlled vocabulary for subjects and names. Linking records to these identifiers rather than to plain text strings is the key shift from string-based to entity-based (linked-data) cataloguing.

In practice. When you create or edit an authority record, add the ISNI or VIAF identifier in the record, not just the preferred name string. It future-proofs your data for BIBFRAME and linked-data discovery, and it disambiguates common names that plain text cannot.

Key takeaways

  • Cataloguing combines a content standard (RDA/IFLA-LRM), an encoding standard (MARC 21, moving to BIBFRAME) and, for digital objects, schemas like MODS and PREMIS.
  • Authority control gives consistent, disambiguated access points and is the backbone of a reliable catalogue.
  • Persistent identifiers (VIAF, ISNI, ORCID) move cataloguing from text strings to linked entities.

Check your understanding

Last modified: Saturday, 1 August 2026, 10:37 AM